“Swift feet press the jungle mud
“Where the shadows are grim and stark,
“And naked men who pant for blood
“Are racing through the dark.”

And Solomon rose and bared his sword,
And swift as tongue could tell,
The dark spewed forth a painted horde
Like shadows out of Hell.

His pistols thundered in the night,
And in that burst of flame
He saw red eyes with hate alight,
And on the figures came.

His sword was like a cobra’s stroke
And death hummed in its tune;
His arm was steel and knotted oak
Beneath the rising moon.

But by him sang another sword,
And a great form roared and thrust,
And dropped like leaves the screaming horde
To writhe in bloody dust.

Silent as death their charge had been,
Silent as night they fled;
And in the trampled glade was seen
Only the torn dead.

And Solomon turned with outstretched hand,
Then halted suddenly,
For no man stood with naked brand
Beneath the moon-lit tree.

Ω

Robert E. Howard was most famously known as the creator of Conan the Barbarian and also created the characters Kull, Breckinridge Elkins, and Solomon Kane. He was a member of the Lovecraft Circle and an early practitioner of what would become the Sword and Sorcery genre. His fiction was appeared in a wide variety of pulp magazines covering a vast array of genres.